The initiative's website explains its tenet as follows: "We believe that artificial intelligence technologies hold great promise for raising the quality of people's lives and can be leveraged to help humanity address important global challenges such as climate change, food, inequality, health and education." All five founding companies have huge AI projects. IBM, as you know, has Watson, while Google has DeepMind, which you probably recognize as the the team behind AlphaGo. Amazon has Alexa, the voice assistance that's loaded onto its Echo speakers, while Microsoft has Cortana and a whole bunch of chatbot projects. Finally, Facebook depends on artificial intelligence for many of its features, including face recognition and its News Feed.

Researchers at the University of Basel in Switzerland have used machine learning to predict the thermodynamic characteristics of 90 new mineral compounds with potential commercial use. The machine learning models were able to predict the chemical stability of all possible iterations of a particular type of class of crystals several orders of magnitude faster than if the researchers had relied on quantum mechanical calculations. The class of compounds in this case was elpasolite, a crystalline material that in nature is made up of four chemical elements: sodium, potassium, aluminum, and fluorine. Some elpasolites emit light when exposed to ionic radiation, which makes them candidates for scintillators, a material that can be used in devices like radiation detectors, CT scanners, and various types of medical diagnostic equipment. Elpasolites could also have applications in electronic equipment, since it can serve as a conductor, semiconductor or insulator, depending upon its specific composition.

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It is hard to find any technology article these days that does not have some reference to artificial intelligence (AI). While one writer touts the amazing powers of AI for good, others are equally passionate with warnings of its potential to destroy the world. It is not often that one topic creates such polarized opinions from equally learned and visionary people. So what is a business leader to do when faced with the inevitable decisions about adopting AI in their enterprise? Like every major innovation, AI can be used for evil as well as for good. But for most businesses, bringing in AI based tools will not be a choice but a necessity.

Microsoft Corp. executive Qi Lu, a key architect of Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella's strategy for artificial intelligence and bots, is leaving the company due to health issues, the software giant said Thursday. Lu was a respected technologist who ran both the Office and search groups in his eight years at the company, following about a decade at Yahoo! Inc. and a stint at IBM Corp. He was injured in a biking accident and is leaving due to related health reasons, ReCode reported earlier. With Lu's departure in October, Microsoft is creating a new AI research group, to be led by 20-year company veteran Harry Shum, whose career has spanned leadership roles across research and Bing engineering. The group will bring together 5,000 computer scientists and engineers executives, including leaders from Cortana, Bing, ambient computing and robotics, Microsoft said in a statement.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's new big idea is the "democratization of artificial intelligence," as in the concept that everybody should have access to AI and AI-powered technology. But to get there, it's meant taking a lot of Microsoft's considerable investments in academic AI science, and turning them into real products that people can actually use, like Skype Translate and Windows Hello. To accelerate that unification of research and product, Microsoft has announced the formation of the new AI and Research Group -- a new organization within Microsoft that combines the Microsoft Research teams with the teams responsible for the Cortana digital assistant, the Bing search engine, and other AI-adjacent products. Leading the new Microsoft AI and Research Group and it's now-5,000-strong team is Harry Shum, previously the head of Microsoft Research, and one of Nadella's direct reports. "Today's move to bring research and engineering even closer will accelerate our ability to deliver more personal and intelligent computing experiences to people and organizations worldwide," Shum says in a press release.

Despite escalating industry pressure for approval of package-delivery drones, safety experts and federal documents indicate widespread flights aren't likely before the next decade. U.S. aviation authorities only recently kicked off the formal, time-consuming process of defining the types of collision-avoidance systems considered essential for such operations to receive broad regulatory authorization. Drafting the technical standards is projected to take three or four years, envisioning a suite of ground-based and airborne sensors that haven't yet been developed. Even strong proponents of unmanned aerial vehicles predict that delivering packages to individual customers probably won't gain significant momentum until at least roughly 2020. "It's not outside the realm of possibility that by the end of the decade, we could see more routine uses" of package-delivery drones, according to Paul McDuffee, co-chair of the federal standards-setting panel and a high-ranking official with Boeing Co. BA -0.13 % 's drone-making unit, Insitu Inc.

Microsoft is combining its Cortana, Bing, and Ambient Computing and Robotics engineering teams with part of its Microsoft Research team to create a new Microsoft AI and Research Group. The newly formed group, unveiled on September 29, will have more than 5,000 people focused on Microsoft's AI product work all-up, and will be headed by Executive Vice President Harry Shum. The new group will handle AI product engineering, basic and applied research and Microssoft's New Experiences and Technologies (NExT) team. Microsoft has been honing its AI focus as of late, emphasizing the company's multi-faceted work in agent technologies (Cortana); increased built-in intelligence in its apps and bots; machine-learning and cognitive services; and infrastructure, specifically around some of its work around field-programmable gate-array technologies and other related Azure cloud work.

The new partnership comes as its members increasingly use artificial intelligence to compete with one another in categories such as consumer electronics and business productivity software. It appears to be aimed, at least in part, at dispelling and defusing public concerns about artificial intelligence, a phrase that often inspires both rational and irrational fears. The rational ones include the prospect of economic dislocation and loss of jobs, while irrational ones--or at least premature ones--embrace science-fiction scenarios, in which robots rule the earth or society confronts the so-called singularity.

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